How This Flyin' Hawaiian is Learning, Living & Loving the Rural Life

The Meal Prep Train

Let’s be honest… the past couple of years I have totally sucked at cooking dinner every night or meal prepping my lunches for work. I’ve fallen off the meal prep train and gone down hill with planning what’s for dinner each night. I mean, my entire day at work revolves around planning and executing, why would I want to do that every single night after a long day of work? Jk, I’m a planner by nature, I just have been lazy at home to say the least. But, the bad habits of eating out or not eating at all have finally gotten to me. This weekend I said, ‘Enough is enough!’ With things always being so busy plus add a tired girl after work on top of that, I knew that if I didn’t take a few hours on the weekend to plan then I’d continue to fail.

So, here’s what I did. First I decided I wanted to prep just my lunches. Then something inside of me said, ‘Psshhh. Why not just prep the entire day for a week!’ Yes, breakfast, lunch AND dinner. So off I went turning to Pinterest of course for meal prep ideas. Before you know it, I was headed to the grocery store and then back home to start cooking and filling my little Tupperware containers.

Here’s what I settled on:

Breakfast- I saw this blog about a lady who wanted to meal prep a hearty breakfast that reminded her of her time growing up on their ranch. It consisted of scrambled eggs and roasted red potatoes with peppers. I have to admit, I wasn’t sure about the scrambled eggs, but I figured since it worked for her I’d give it a try. Plus we already had a bag of baby red potatoes so it was a win! I had my first taste of my meal prepped breakfast this morning and it tasted just fine! And I’m still full from it! Here’s the recipe if you want to give it a try! I added a couple sausage links to mine.

Lunch- I made a knock off Starbucks protein box. It has: cucumber slices, a hard boiled egg, a couple pieces of cheese, some grapes and celery sticks with a little peanut butter and raisins. Super easy!

Dinner- This is where we always fail. Jace hates cooking and if I fail to plan ahead on dinner then it’s really easy to cave (and unhealthy) and get takeout. Knowing that Jace likely wouldn’t want to eat chicken every night, I compromised and made up a huge meatloaf. Half the nights we’ll have meatloaf, rice and steamed broccoli. For the other nights, I grilled up some awesome tasting chicken breast to go over a bed of greens for salad. We had this last night and it was so good! Here’s the simple chicken recipe if you want to try it!

So, for this week, I am feeing like super woman. Three hours of being in the kitchen over the weekend will make my life so much easier this week and will keep us on track and eating at home!